This article, which has been turned into a book, is the narration of a social history research work taken place in the Amazon region in the 1980's. The research studied the rubber cycle, emphasizing the relations among rubber workers, airplane pilots and the so-called 'rubber barons'. The main sources of information used in the study come from magazines, newspapers and other publications from that period of time, as well as documents from Belém City Hall archives. The project was part of a theoretical discussion on the explanatory validity of the theory of dependence. The article focus on the limitations of the approach used at the time, but it does not disregard the important contribution of the research, which brought up new issues on the rubber workers' resistance against the exploitation of their labor force, as well as on the existence of contradictory views among the members of the rubber elite themselves.
Brazilian history; Amazon region; rubber cycle; social history; historical documentation research